IMAP Migration in Office 365 Admin Center

Himanshu Goyal
Updated On - 24 Jan 2019

You can easily migrate user’s emails from their IMAP enabled email servers to Office 365 using the Internet Message Access Protocol. But, before starting the migration process, there are some limitations that you need to know of.

Only the inbox items or other email folders can be migrated. You cannot migrate contacts, calendars, and tasks.

On clicking Data Migration, the “Select your data service” dashboard will appear on the screen. If your email provider is listed in it, then select it.

After selecting the email provider, you’ll be redirected to select users.

Select the users that you want to migrate and fill the email alias & password.

Click “Start Migration” at the left corner of the wizard after entering the required information.

The migration status will be any of these: Starting – Queued – Syncing – Synced. When the status comes to Synced, click “Stop Migration” to finish the process. Once the process is complete, click “Close Connection.”

Using the same technique, you can also migrate from other IMAP email servers.

How to Migrate if Your Provider is Not Listed?

Migrating from IMAP to Office 365 with listed providers is easy. But, if the email provider is not listed, then the process becomes a little complex. Follow the below steps for non-listed email providers.

Select other email sources from “Select your data service” dashboard.

Now, fill the IMAP connection data with appropriate details to test the connection. You can use any IMAP account for this. Look at the below example for Google apps. Click the “Save” button to test the connection.

Once the connection is established, it will display all the user mailboxes for the provided email address.

When you migrate from other email providers that are not listed, you’ll have to provide the app password. After adding the details, follow the above steps from 5-7 to migrate the user’s emails.

As you can see, migrating IMAP mailboxes to Office 365 with Admin Center is not an easy option. Also, this process is not viable for non-technical users. So, you should use a third-party tool that allows to migrate IMAP to Office 365 mailboxes efficiently. Kernel IMAP to Office 365 is an advanced software that is specially designed to migrate mailboxes from different IMAP servers to Office 365. It has some advanced features that make the migration process convenient and simple.

Allows migration of single/multiple mailboxes from IMAP email servers

Bulk migration of IMAP mailboxes using CSV file

Allow easy migration of archive mailboxes as well as public folders

Smart filtering options to migrate specific mailboxes or data

Saves the migration report in a CSV format

Successfully migrates to different versions of Exchange and Office 365

Conclusion

As you see the manual process to migrate IMAP mailboxes to Office 365 in this blog, you will get an idea why migrating from Office 365 admin center is a complicated process. So, we provide an alternative solution – Kernel IMAP to Office 365 tool that makes the migration process easier.